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In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the merchants of Julfa, a town on the trade routes linking the Mediterranean with Iran, developed an extensive international trade network reaching from the Atlantic coast of Europe to the Indian Ocean. Part 1 of the dissertation traces the history of Julfa and examines the factors contributing to the Armenians' success - among them the significant growth of Iranian raw silk exports to Europe; the stimulus to East-West trade given by the influx of American silver to Europe and the consequent imbalance in the value of bullion between Europe, the Middle East and South Asia; the forced resettlement of the Julfans in Isfahan and the formation of a close economic relationship with the Safavi court. Part 2 concentrates on social and economic organisation, examining the structure of the Armenian patriarchal household and its commercial operation as family firm, and the community and its provision of the institutions that upheld commercial law and the merchants' system of values and standards of behaviour. The discussion in Chapters 4 and 5 of partnership and agency and the credit system operated by the Julfans is based on research into surviving contracts and credit instruments. These documents also provide the material for Part 3. The Julfan mercantile documents are a unique record of the commercial world of an Asian trading community in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. They also present numerous technical difficulties, which are discussed through the presentation of examples of documents in the original, with translation, notes and a glossary. The history of the Julfa merchants affords a rare opportunity for close examination of the organisation and techniques of trade in Asia and provides a basis for comparison with other Asian merchants.

My research examines the interconnected histories of urbanism and urban development in port cities across South and Southeast Asia. Chapter one examines the effects of the third plague pandemic on the quotidian livelihoods and the built environments of the urban poor across Bombay, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Considering corporeal measures to inspect the bodies and homes of the urban poor and measures to introduce urban ‘improvement’ schemes, this chapter argues that plague sparked a sustained interest in the urban conditions of the poor across British South and Southeast Asia. Chapter two considers the works of the Bombay Improvement Trust, Rangoon Development Trust, and Singapore Improvement Trust through the early decades of the twentieth century and analyses how an imperial urbanism based on a ‘Bombay model’ translated to Singapore and other port cities across the Indian Ocean world. Chapter three considers the consequences of the second wave of ‘indirect’ attacks on urban slums on an evolving imperial urbanism in Bombay, Rangoon, and Singapore. While previous chapters examined the emergence of an imperial urbanism centred on Bombay’s example, chapter four considers the extent to which Bombay remained central to this urbanism during the late 1930s and Second World War. Analysing the divergent consequences of patterns of urban growth in Bombay, Hong Kong, and Singapore throughout the late-1930s, this chapter considers late-colonial efforts to house the urban poor as well as the extent to which the war recast the post-war housing situation. Chapter five contextualises post-war rhetoric of economic and urban development in Hong Kong and Singapore within narratives of pre-war urban ‘improvement’. In connecting pre-war and post-war approaches to accommodating the urban poor, the final chapter considers the reorientation of earlier circulations of knowledge around urban poverty in port cities and its implications for emerging post-colonial regional, national and urban identities.

In the last decade, scholars have recognized economic development and modernization as crucial themes in the history of the twentieth century and the ‘global Cold War.’ Yet while historians have written lucid histories of the role of the social sciences in American foreign policy in the Third World, far less is known on the Soviet Union’s ideological and material support during the same period for countries like Egypt, India, Ethiopia, Angola, or – most prominently – Afghanistan. This dissertation argues that the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan is best understood as the final and most costly of a series developmental interventions staged in that country during the latter half of the twentieth century by Afghans, Soviets, Americans, Germans and others. Cold War-era Afghanistan is best understood as a laboratory for ideas about the nation-state and the idea of a ‘national economy.’ One can best understand Afghanistan during that period less through a common but ahistorical ‘graveyard of empires’ narrative, and more in terms of the history of the social sciences, the state system in South and Central Asia, and the ideological changes in ideas about the state and the economy in 20th century economic thought. Four chapters explore this theme, looking at the history of the Soviet social sciences, developmental interventions in Afghanistan prior to 1978, a case study of Soviet advisors in eastern Afghanistan, and Soviet interventions to protect Afghan women. Making use of new materials from Soviet, German, and American archives, and dozens of interviews with former Soviet advisors, this dissertation makes a new and meaningful contribution to the historical literature on the Soviet Union, Central Asia, and international history.

This thesis examines Karen childhood transitions in a context of expansion of the cash economy, formal education and modern institutions. Since the 1960s, Thai state development has had a significant impact on the organisation of work and learning among highland populations. Today, household economies largely depend on cash income and children aspire towards an adult life in which paid work is central. Formal education is highly valued as a means to reach this goal. Children often migrate for education to better-resourced locations and access scholarships provided by national and international institutions. On the basis of 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork undertaken between October 2007 and September 2009, the thesis seeks to understand the effects of globalisation on politically and economically marginalized children in northern Thailand through the lens of changing modes of production and learning. Findings indicate that children’s migration for education reflects broad political economic inequalities among Karen households as well as between them and mainstream Thai lowland populations. International dimensions of unequal relations are revealed in local peoples’ collective negotiations with Japanese and Catholic Christian NGOs. Although socio-cultural constructs like ‘gender’, ‘generation’, and ‘ethnicity’ shape Karen childhoods, this study found that their economic and political status are more fundamental in shaping all aspects of their social lives, including their socio-cultural identities. Childhood transitions emerge as multidimensional learning processes towards mastery of ‘translocal identities’, the skill to manage identities and relationships across multiple spaces and institutions. This is a culturally valued skill evidenced when minority children tactfully negotiate differing modes of compliance, resistance, and adaptation, especially in the domains of work and education. Thus, children participate in the moulding of local versions of the modern political economy of northern Thailand.

The art of reading and its application to knowledge acquisition and innovation by elites have been largely neglected by historians of print culture and reading in late imperial China (1368-1911). Unlike most studies, which are concerned more with the implied reader and individual reading experience, the present study assumes that the actual reader and the social, cultural and epistemic dimensions of reading practices are the central issues of a history of reading in China. That is, while the art of reading was internalized by the individual, his learning and application of it had social, cultural and epistemic features. At a time when secular reading practices in Renaissance England were informed by Erasmian principles, Ming literati, regardless of their different philosophical stances, were being trained in an art of reading proposed by Zhu Xi (1130-1200), whose Neo-Confucian philosophy had been esteemed as orthodox since the fourteenth century. Transformations and challenges in interpreting and applying his art did not hinder its general reception among elite readers. Its common employment determined the practitioner’s epistemic frame and manner of knowledge innovation. My dissertation consists of five chapters bracketed with an introduction and conclusion. Chapter One discusses Zhu’s theory of reading and the implied pattern of acquiring and innovating knowledge, based on a careful reading of his writings and conversations. Chapter Two describes the transmission of Zhu’s theory from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. During its transmission, Zhu’s art was reedited, rephrased, and even readapted by both government agencies and individual authors with different intentions and agendas. Chapter Three focuses on the reception of Zhu’s theory of reading by 1500 and argues that the moral end of reading eventually triumphed over the intellectual one in early Ming Confucian philosophy. Chapter Four explores the affinity of Ming philosophers of mind with Zhu’s theory in their reading concepts and practices from 1500 to the mid-seventeenth century. Despite their attempts to separate themselves intellectually from the Song tradition, Ming philosophers of mind followed Zhu’s rules for reading in their intellectual practices. Chapter Five outlines the reading habits and knowledge landscape based on a statistical survey of extant Ming imprints. Despite some deviations, the Ming reading habits and knowledge framework largely accorded with Zhu’s theory and its Ming adaptations. The continuity of reading habits from Zhu’s time to the seventeenth century, I conclude, inspires us to rethink the Ming apostasy from the Song tradition. The particularity of scholarly knowledge acquisition and innovation in Ming-Qing China by the eighteenth century was not invented by Ming-Qing scholars but anticipated by Zhu through his theory of reading. With respect to late imperial China, the history of reading, together with the history of knowledge, is yet to be fruitfully explored. With this dissertation, I hope to be able to make a contribution to the understanding of the East Asian orthodox habit of reading as represented by Zhu’s admirers. By placing my investigation in the context of the history of knowledge, I also hope to contribute to the understanding of the relationship of reading to the way that knowledge evolved in traditional China. Intellectual historians tended to consider the Ming Confucian tradition as having broken off from the Cheng-Zhu tradition, but at least in reading habits and practices Ming elite readers perpetuated Zhu’s theory of reading and the knowledge framework it implied.

The Tuoba's success in the making of the Northern Wei as a conquest dynasty in fifth century northern China will be argued in this thesis as a result of their ability to cross between the traditions and practices of the Chinese sphere and those of the Eurasian steppe, through the construction of a "dual presence" in the Pingcheng period (398-494 CE). A negotiation of material culture in this formative phase of state-building allowed for new notions of kingship, dynastic identity, and representations of daily life to be (re)created. This was manifested separately through the application of mountain-side stone sculptures, tomb repertoires, as well as the conception of Pingcheng as a capital city. The material cultural expressions explored in this thesis reflect significant changes in the socio-cultural atmosphere at this point in history. In effect, these ritual, funerary, and commemorative discourses wove together to create new notions of "Chineseness" in fifth century northern China. In the following discussion, we will come to recognize the Tuoba’s maintenance of a "dual presence", not only as "Son of Heaven" to the conquered subjects, but also carrying over practices that befit a Khagan in the Central Asian tradition, as an act of ingenuity.

This thesis challenges the prevailing academic and journalistic consensus that ASEAN states, bound by a cast-iron norm of non-interference, do not intervene in other states’ internal affairs. It argues that ASEAN states have frequently engaged in acts of intervention, often with very serious, negative consequences. Using methods of critical historical sociology, the thesis reconstructs the history of ASEAN’s non-interference principle and interventions from ASEAN’s inception onwards, drawing on sources including ASEAN and UN documents, US and UK archives, and policymaker interviews. It focuses especially on three case studies: East Timor, Cambodia, and Myanmar. The thesis argues that both the emergence of ideologies of non-intervention and their violation can be explained by the social conflicts animating state policies. Non-interference was developed by embattled, authoritarian, capitalist elites in an attempt to bolster their defence of capitalist social order from radical challenges. Where adherence to non-intervention failed to serve this purpose, it was discarded or manipulated to permit cross-border ‘containment’ operations. After communism was defeated in the ASEAN states, foreign policy continued to promote the interests of dominant, state-linked business groups and oligarchic factions. Non-interference shifted to defend domestic power structures from the West’s liberalising agenda. However, ASEAN elites continued meddling in neighbouring states even as containment operations were discarded. This contributed to the collapse of Cambodia’s ruling coalition in 1997, and ASEAN subsequently intervened to restore it. The 1997 Asian financial crisis dealt a crippling blow to ASEAN. To contain domestic unrest in Indonesia, core ASEAN states joined a humanitarian intervention in East Timor in 1999. In the decade since, non-interference has been progressively weakened as the core members struggle to regain domestic legitimacy and lost international political and economic space. This is expressed most clearly in ASEAN’s attempts to insert itself into Myanmar’s democratisation process after decades of failed ‘constructive engagement’.

This thesis is an enquiry into the conditions in which various understandings of the newly introduced but vaguely grasped Western notion of ‘art’ emerged and sustained themselves in the name of cultural reproduction in early twentieth-century China. This Western concept of art was translated into Chinese as ‘meishu’, a neologism originally coined in Japanese kanji, and regarded as the embodiment of the ‘national essence’. Through a close examination of five art-related publishing events—the publication of the nationalistic journal Guocui xuebao; the launch of the art periodical Shenzhou guoguangji; the endeavours to compile a book collection on art, Meishu congshu; the making of the text Zhonguo yishujia zhenglüe which claimed to be a history book of Chinese ‘meishu’; and an example of image appropriation from Stephen Bushell’s Chinese Art—this thesis explores the ways in which different ‘neologistic imaginations’ of the term ‘meishu’ were constructed through publishing practices attempting to preserve and reproduce the ‘national essence’, by creating from the existent tradition a category of ‘art’ equivalent to that in the European West. Unlike previous scholarship, which deems any understanding of ‘meishu’ that deviated from the ‘authentic’ European model a ‘misconception’, this thesis sees these disparate understandings of ‘meishu’ as equally valid statements competing for dominance in the discursive field of art. This thesis thus argues that there existed at least three modes of utterances regarding the notion of ‘meishu’ in early twentieth-century China, and that the success of any such given utterance depended upon the acceptance of the authentic quality argued in its strategy of cultural reproduction. This thesis hence not only offers a detailed analysis of each publishing event, but also provides an interpretative framework within which the recognition of these utterances can be analysed by their strategic approaches to claiming cultural authenticity.

Readings of contemporary accounts of the Japanese invasion of Choson Korea and Ming China's intervention, by Japanese, Korean, and Chinese writers; analysis of the writers' disparate world-views and how they each envision their country and its neighbours. This thesis uses contemporary writings from across the region to study the significance of the East Asian War of 1592-1598 for Chinese, Korean, and Japanese senses of identity, and argues that the war was a crucial moment in the development of those identities. Despite the 1592-1598 conflict affecting millions of people, and resulting in almost unprecedented cross-border flows of people and information, most previous considerations of its effect on identity have focused on court documents. In the first dedicated study of identities in the East Asian War, this thesis shifts from the hitherto emphasis on politicians and commanders to prioritize individuals at the frontiers of cross-border contact. This shift of focus from centre to periphery contributes to our understanding of two areas of history. In terms of the East Asian War as a historical event, it provides a far more nuanced picture of what this momentous conflict signified for people at the time. In terms of the history of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese identities, it demonstrates persuasively that the sense of belonging to a country held real meaning for people across society, influencing the actions even of those totally removed from the state. Tracing the legacy of frontier writings again contributes to both the history of the war and of identity, by revealing how peripheral insights and central biases combined to give birth to the orthodox narratives of the war, some of which remain influential to this day. Personal writings show how first-hand encounters in the war modified but also re-inforced already well-established identities, making national identities of immediate significance for an immeasurably wider group than in peace time. The late sixteenth-century growth in printing and literacy subsequently greatly amplified the impact of the East Asian War by allowing real-life interaction to be endlessly re-told as a dramatic clash between China, Korea, and Japan. This study restores the war to its proper place as a key moment in the longer development of national identities in East Asia. It also calls for a primary-source based, East-Asia centred reconsideration of theories on the historical development of collective identity, which remain overly influenced by later European experience.